for orchestra (2022)
20 minutes
Instrumentation
2222* / 42(flugh)02(euph, tuba) / timp / 2 perc / hp / piano (also celesta) / strings
2 Flutes, 2 Oboes, 2 Clarinets in A, 2 Bassoons (2nd doubling Contrabassoon)
4 Horns in F, 2 Flugelhorns in B♭ (Ensure they have great projection for the loud passages. They may exceptionally be played on Cornets in B♭ or Trumpets in B♭. Both instruments should however be of the same type.)
1 Euphonium, 1 Tuba
1 Timpani player
2 Percussion players: Marimba (five-octave instrument), Xylophone, Crotales (two-octave instrument preferably with damping pedal), Vibraphone, Glockenspiel
1 Harp (preferably 2)
Celesta (five-octave instrument) (doubling Piano)
Strings (Double Basses: most, if not all, must have low extension)
Description
In three movements, played without a break.
Samy Moussa turned to a quote from Xenophon’s Anabasis:
At this stage entered musicians blowing upon horns such as they use for signal calls, and trumpeting on trumpets, made of raw oxhide, tunes and airs, like the music of the double-octave harp.
Though Moussa’s vision of this passage is primarily aesthetic rather than metaphorical, we might think we hear such instruments right away, their menace turned to majesty as they become a quartet of regular orchestral horns buttressed by a pair of flugelhorns (which have a warmer, rounder sound than their trumpet cousins), euphonium and tuba. Two of the horns push up through small steps to a major chord and then, with the woodwind now engaged, another. Not so much a theme, this music is more a state of being – effort and arrival, repeated – and it will recur throughout the symphony, usually associated with the brass.
Here immediately, though, it is brought back by the strings, and followed by a magniloquent descent, in slow triple rhythm. These two types of music are alternated further, until the woodwind carry the first music into the upper air and leave it floating.
A new sort of music arrives: a quick scale pattern descending through four notes. Soon this is snaking everywhere in the woodwind and tuned percussion. The scoring has all the usual keyed instruments – vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel and so on – together with harp and piano, as well as a timpani part that becomes more prominent through this passage. Returning frequently, the original four-note pattern is keyed to grand harmonic modulations as the music grows in power.
Everything the symphony needs is now in place. The harmonic progression reaches a point where the brass can bring back the first music, but this does not now happen. Instead the work moves into what is marked in the score as the second movement, though the musical progress is continuous. The symphony remains a play of forces: a whirling pounding and the brass group’s first music.
Eventually this music rises to where a breakthrough seems inevitable. Yet this does not occur. Instead the symphony moves into its third movement, but again there is no break, only a shift of tone, a release into airiness. The re-entry of the brass changes this, and a solo flugelhorn announces the end by restoring the grand descent in threefold steps. But the brass seem intent on starting all over again, to the shock of their companions. An F major chord provides the conclusion promised from the unison F of the beginning, but we may sense that in the background the great sphere is still turning, will not be stopped.
— Paul Griffiths
Recording
Dedication
Gustavo Gimeno
Commission
Jointly commissioned by Toronto Symphony Orchestra and BBC Radio 3 for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as part of BBC Proms
First performance
May 25, 2022
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Roy Thomson Hall
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Gustavo Gimeno, conductor
Pairing suggestions
Robert Schumann: Symphony No. 2
Jean Sibelius: Symphonies
Carl Nielsen: Symphony No. 2
Leoš Janáček: Taras Bulba
Access
Available for hire.
Contact Nicolas Farmer: nicolas.farmer(a)samymoussa.com